Effective immediately I am stepping down from the Nodejs TSC

Yes, and I think that's fine. (I'm in a largely similar position in my own job as it happens, and my management agrees: we probably want out of the technology I'm working on, but we want it well-maintained until we figure out what our better option is.)

My sense, and again I am an outsider and might be wrong, is that Rod wasn't of the opinion that he'll enforce the CoC as long as the TSC (other smart people) and the Node community see it as the right current plan, but he'll advocate for long-term change. He was of the opinion that, right now, not only was the CoC without merit, but it's reasonable for him to actively apologize for moderation actions that the rest of the TSC took.

That is I think not directly analogous to what you are doing. It is much more analogous to you replying to your coworkers code reviews with "-1, it's 2017, you shouldn't write in C," or replying to your customers' bug reports with "Yeah, well, we're writing in C so of course our code is broken." Your coworkers are willing to work with you because they believe, regardless of what articles you're sharing, that for the foreseeable future you will write the best C you can and help them write the best C they can. If that trust is there, advocating for change is totally reasonable. If it's not, and either you believe that your coworkers are hopelessly misguided or they believe that you're hopelessly misguided, one of the two factions needs to leave for the team to be productive again.

Well yes, lots of projects do run on the so-called "benign dictator" model. As do nearly all companies.

Moderators abusing their power is absolutely possible. However it seems to me, anecdotally, that putting in place a CoC is a good sign that such abuse is about to get far more common.

The problem is that a CoC cannot really be any more precise than my vague 'use common sense' strategy is. A CoC will basically say "be nice to people, don't be a dick" in more flowery language, but ultimately - as incidents like this one show - there will still be moderators who decide whether any given incident is in violation. So a CoC doesn't really help with moderator abuse: if they want to be abusive, they're going to do it.

Of course, you can get really in depth and create judgement panels, voting mechanisms, appeals processes etc for a CoC violation. But we already have that, it's law.

>>>The free speech right guarded by the First Amendment in the US is not absolute; there are categories that don't meet the criteria (such as the "falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater" example, Schenck v. United States, 1919).

Except for the fact that I am not talking about, nor ever used a reference to the 1st amendment to the US Constitution

I am talking about Free Speech, not Constitutional law. Those are different issues

Further, I am extremely tired of people using "Yell Fire" as a excuse for censorship

Schenck was a TERRIBLE precedent and has been largely over turned by other rulings

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

"Bear all of that in mind the next time someone name-drops Holmes and cites Schenck as part of a broad endorsement of censorship. The problem isn't that they're incorrectly citing Holmes. The problem is that they are citing him exactly right, for the vague, censorious, and fortunately long-departed "standard" he articulated. Justice Holmes, three generations of hearing your sound-bite are enough." -- Ken White

Why would an article on missing generics in Go be inflammatory? Repetitive, wrong, tiresome, whatever, sure - in your view. But inflammatory? Please. This is symptomatic of the general abuse of language that I have come to associate with social justice related conflicts. Absurd over the top language and imagery is used to try and justify absurd and over the top responses.

The tweets by ag_dubs seem like a good example. She starts by saying up front her problem with Rod is that he "criticises social policies in node" and she can't handle that so she lessened her participation. Presumably she means policies like the CoC.

Then she goes on to assert that he "engaged in targeted harassment against me personally". Because of his "unrestrained antagonism", she often has to have "other people speak on my behalf to sidestep his derailing responses".

Having read that set of tweets, put simply, I don't believe her. I do not believe she has been harassed. I think she can't separate someone disagreeing with her on social policy issues with "harassment". The logic leap from "he harassed me" to, "that's why I ... avoid his derailing responses" clearly isn't rooted in any conventional definition of harassment. And what does it even mean, getting others to speak for her?

> The logic leap from "he harassed me" to, "that's why I ... avoid his derailing responses" clearly isn't rooted in any conventional definition of harassment.

Um, yes it is. A harassing response which does not address the substance of your points is clearly a derailing response. That you can't "clearly" see this says more about you than it does about her.

> And what does it even mean, getting others to speak for her?

Literally, it means asking a colleague to say the exact thing that she wishes to say, because she knows that if she says it he will try to ad hominem it. This is standard English.

I would also point out that some of her vocabulary, "Beyond ____, also ____", is also standard English and it forbids your egregiously malformed interpretation of her comments. That is, you seem to think that the "targeted harassment" is "his constant, unproductive criticism" when in fact the criticism is clearly, in context, the "what he has done to the health of the project" which she has just been talking about -- and she has saying that "beyond" that, he "also" has targeted her with harassing statements. That construction explicitly forbids your sophomoric armchair psychoanalysis which can't separate someone who happens to disagree with you on social policy issues as "she can't separate someone disagreeing with her on social policy issues with harassment." (I don't actually believe that you are this way -- I don't know you -- I just think that your comment reeks of it and I would observe in passing that paradoxically we all accuse ourselves of our own sins. I mean, I'm terribly guilty of the latter, at least.)